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How news organizations are battling the scourge of trolls in the comment section

Can comments be saved or is it time to let it go?

A woman typing on the keyboard of her laptop computer in Beijing. Many people use internet comment sections to leave inflammatory or offensive remarks, but is it possible to fix it?Photo: Photo credit should read FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP/Getty Images

Daniel Rosen

Published: February 13, 2015 - 2:04 PM

Everyone on the internet knows the mantra: Don’t read the comments.

The comment section is often considered the wasteland of the internet, populated by trolls who post deliberately offensive comments to discourage civil discussion. Their mission is not to further debate, but derail it entirely with inflammatory messages, often laden with bigotry and designed to provoke outrage. If they do their job well, a comment sections turns into a heated argument, the above article’s actual contents be damned.

Even though it’s not hard to find examples of trolling online, it’s rare to see them get their comeuppance. In 2011, a British man named Sean Duffy was arrested for posting images and videos mocking dead teenagers on their family’s memorial Facebook pages. He was jailed for 18 weeks, but it’s often hard to track down trolls, especially those who wield multiple anonymous accounts.

Recently, comment sections have been jettisoned by a wide variety of internet publications. Popular Mechanics, Reuters, the Chicago Sun-Times, even popular YouTube personality Felix “PewDiePie” Kjellberg have all shut off comments for the same reason: there’s just no way to stop the trolls. Others, however, aren’t ready to give up just yet.

Talia Stroud, the director of the Engaging News Project, doesn’t believe comment sections are a lost cause. In fact, she’s been doing research in how to turn them into something better.

“We would like comment sections to become an online space where people can have good discussions and learn from one another,” she said.

The project’s research focuses on news organizations, and when it comes to comment sections, Stroud said they give readers a place to leave feedback and a reason to spend more time on the site.

“On the one hand, it’s unfortunate when sites decide to shut down their comment sections, because they’re taking away that connection with the community,” said Stroud. “On the other hand, we know that these spaces can become overwhelmed by incivility and that uncivil comments can affect what people take away from journalism.”

The project’s research has found that having writers personally engage with commenters reduces the chances of an uncivil comment by 15 per cent. On top of that, troll comments decreased by nine per cent when an article ended with a simple yes or no question rather than an invitation to leave a comment below.

“When we first started our study on journalist involvement in the comment section,” she said, “I thought that a staff member wading into the comments using a generic station logo would improve the civility of the space, although maybe not as much as a well-known reporter. In our study, this didn’t happen.”

Stroud says that one explanation for the results is that people are less likely to troll when they feel like they’re being heard by a recognizable person from the news, something they don’t get from an unknown staffer using the company logo as an avatar. As for why they troll, other research has shown that anonymity brings out the worst in people who already fit the troll profile. A University of Manitoba study titled “Trolls just Want to Have Fun” shows that these nasty commenters often have the “Dark Tetrad” of personality traits: narcissism, psychopathy, sadism and Machiavellianism.

This week though, one publication decided that if trolls are determined to unleash their vitriol, they’ll have to pay for the privilege. Tablet, an online Jewish magazine, started charging daily, monthly and yearly fees for accessing and posting comments to articles on their site.

“The internet, for all of its wonders, poses challenges to civilized and constructive discussion,” writes Tablet editor-in-chief Alana Newhouse. “Sometimes allowing destructive — and, often, anonymous — individuals to drag it down with invective (and worse). Instead of shutting off comments altogether (as some outlets are starting to do), we are going to try something else: ask those of you who’d like to comment on the site to pay a nominal fee — less a paywall than a gesture of your own commitment to the cause of great conversation.”

Wikipedia’s Jimbo Wales teaching a class on how to identify trolls on the internet in 2006. [Wikimedia Commons]

One day of comments will cost $2, a week is $18, and a year is $180. The fees are high, but they’re meant to lock out trolls before they can even sign up.

Tablet’s not the first site to put comments behind a paywall. Metafilter, an online community that’s existed since 1999, introduced a mandatory $5 sign-up fee, something founder Matt Haughey says keeps the incivility at bay. In his opinion though, Tablet might be going too far.

“Their pricing is kind of hilarious,” he told Postmedia. “It sends the message that they don’t want to see comments. The prices are so high that they’re essentially shutting down comments on their site.”

Metafilter found sudden popularity after Sept. 11, 2011 for having a thread that catalogued news of the terrorist attacks in the U.S. in real time, something that caused sign-ups to skyrocket. Haughey didn’t have the time or money to moderate each new member, so he shut down registration from 2002 to 2004. After that, he experimented with growing the site by releasing 10 new accounts every day. Then, Haughey noticed that people started selling their accounts on eBay.

“Someone sold their account for $100,” he said. “And I thought to myself ‘there’s a black market for these? That sucks, I can crush them.'”

An example of a comment thread on Metafilter, which charges a $5 fee to sign up and comment. [Metafilter]

Haughey said the $5 fee doesn’t even pay to keep the lights on, it’s just there to stop abuse.

“It keeps out riff raff and jokesters and spammers,” he said. “People who show up to spam or troll have to be really dedicated.”

Haughey noted the fee is a “ginormous” hurdle for participation. He doesn’t want his site to be the next Facebook, he wants a small, manageable community, and the fee keeps it that way. But what about larger sites? Can comments ever be civil when there’s no limit on who can participate?

There is one other option to beat the trolls, but it doesn’t come cheap: moderation. Metafilter’s $5 fee isn’t perfect, and the trolls that slip through the cracks need to be managed by humans that can delete their comments and refund their accounts.

It’s like the letter to the editor page with no editor, every crackpot wacko can comment, and it just stays there

“I pay humans to weed it like a garden,” said Haughey. “We delete at least one per cent of everything that’s posted, because it’s either problematic or derailing or just dumb. It takes a shit-ton of effort, and money and humans. It sucks, it’s expensive as hell, but there are no magic bullets here.”

“Newspapers don’t have the time or money for personnel to manage those. It’s like the letter to the editor page with no editor, every crackpot wacko can comment, and it just stays there.”

As for Tablet, almost all their front page articles now have zero comments, while articles from before the paywall announcement have dozens. The site is encouraging people to comment via Twitter or Facebook, or send e-mails that can be picked through, edited and published in a new Letters to the Editor column.

Blowing up the comment section from orbit might stop trolls, but it also stops the conversation in its tracks.

“There’s not a magic solution for creating robust civil discussion online,” said Stroud. “We hope that our research helps newsrooms improve civility in their comments, so they don’t have to shut them.”